Crash-Dieting and Muscle Mass

Hi, I am Steve Terrano and welcome to this edition of body performance. On our previous broadcast, we talked about how crash dieting or significantly decreasing your caloric intake causes your metabolism to slow down. Today I want to talk about how crash dieting causes you to lose muscle mass.

You may not understand this, let me see if I can explain it to you. When you cut back your calories significantly, your body begins to worry. It is upset. I am not taking any calories, vitamins, minerals. Then it realizes wait a minute I have got all these muscles on me which are just like steak loaded with amino acids, vitamins and nutrients and calories. So what happens is your body begins to catabolize or break down your muscle mass for nutrition. So as you begin to lose body fat, you are also losing muscle so essentially your body composition or your muscle to fat ratio does not really change.

Then if you happen to put that fat back on, you do not put the muscle back on so crash dieting then leaves you with a worse body composition. I hate to sound like a broken record but the best way to combat this is to decrease your caloric intake slightly, increase your activity level and be patient. That is the best way to lose weight. I will see you next time, love your body.


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